Re: Director's Job Description

[lady brown <YKFLB@TTACS.TTU.EDU>]

Marcia

1.  Do you do any tutoring?
	Yes

2.  How much?
	During the academic year, I tutor 6-8 hours a week.

3. Why?
I tutor for several reasons:
	
* I want to have two tutors available during the 40 hours
we are open each week.  At this time, I have 8 tutors who work 9
hours a week for a total of 72 hours.  That leaves 8 hours with
only one consultant; thus I fill in the remaining eight hours.

*  By sharing part of the tutoring load, I hope to create an 
environment in which the consultants and I are colleagues.

*  As a tutor, I can also model the kinds of professional
behavior I expect of the other tutors.

*  Tutoring keeps me aware of the different kinds of writing
faculty members are assigning.

*  Tutoring keeps me in contact with our clients.  The process
keeps me sensitive to the needs of brand new first year students
as well as to graduate students.

*  Tutoring enables me to read lots of interesting documents--NSF
grant proposals, dissertation proposals, letters of application
as well as different kinds of essays.
 
By the way, (this is an aside), we are in the process of developing
new building(s) for education, philosopy, and English.  The
writing center is being included in this project, although we are
officially separate from the English department--a somewhat
symbiotic relationship exists.  Anyway, the architects have had a
bit of difficulty understanding what a writing center is and how
it works, although I've talked to various ones on different
occasions.  Yesterday afternoon, a first year student came to the
center with a draft of a paper about some aspect of Freshman
English.  By the title, I could see it was about the writing
center.  I told the young man that I didn't know if I could read
the essay or not, especially if the paper was critical.  He
grinned and said I could read it.  Well, the essay was very
favorable and fairly well written.  I asked him if I could make a
copy to show the architects with whom I had a meeting later that
afternoon.  He agreed, and I did give a copy to the architects. 
I think his paper told them what we do and how we do it and how
students react to what is going on.  Had I not been tutoring, I
would not have had the opportunity to take advantage of this bit
of serendipity.

4. Who determines how many hours?

I do.

5. What % of your total responsibility is WC?
	
67% of my time is devoted to the writing center as director; the
other 33% is devoted to one class in the fall and one class in
the spring as a part-time lecturer.  I am not tenure track nor
tenured, but I've retained faculty status by teaching these
classes.

Lady Falls Brown
ykflb@ttacs.ttu.edu